Guess what is the most popular class in Harvard Univ? Hint, can it be “how to be rich”? Answer is: No, it is the class taught by Prof Tal Ben-Shahar called “how to be happy”. If you are interested on some common sense that can make yourself happy without drinking or using drugs, keep reading.
Well, my job is consultant, all I do everyday is to travel to places, meet people and solve problems, but a lot of the times I see unhappy faces, people are worried, concerned and upset on lots of things. Comparatively, I am a happy guy and in retrospect what makes me happy? it actually lined up quite well with the six tips for happiness that are offered by Prof Shahar’s class “Positive Physology”. If you want to see the video, click the class website.
1. Give yourself permission to be human. Accept not reject. When we accept emotions — such as fear, sadness, or anxiety — as natural, we are more likely to overcome them. Rejecting our emotions, positive or negative, leads to frustration and unhappiness.
2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable. When this is not feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters, moments throughout the week that provide you with both pleasure and meaning.
3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account. Barring extreme circumstances, our level of well being is determined by what we choose to focus on (the full or the empty part of the glass) and by our interpretation of external events. For example, do we view failure as catastrophic, or do we see it as a learning opportunity?
4. Simplify! We are, generally, too busy, trying to squeeze in more and more activities into less and less time. Quantity influences quality, and we compromise on our happiness by trying to do too much.
5. Remember the mind-body connection. What we do — or don’t do — with our bodies influences our mind. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, and healthy eating habits lead to both physical and mental health.
6. Express gratitude, whenever possible. We too often take our lives for granted. Learn to appreciate and savor the wonderful things in life, from people to food, from nature to a smile.
I think the last one is very handy, spend a few minutes a day and write down the things that you are thankful, the list is not for others to read, but for you to appreciate.
May 31st, 2006
I just don’t like the fact that I have to carry around client laptops physically when I travel between home and client site. This makes me thinking about how to convert the physical box to vmware virtual images so that I can run cliente OS on my “powerful” thinkpads. After some experiments, here is how I successfully converted my windows 2000 physical install to a vmware that can runs on VMware player (free) , your experience may vary depending on what OS you want convert.
What you need:
- Drive image clone program (I used Norton Ghost
on a bootable media (USB drive or CD-ROM)
- VMware workstation to create image (this is not free, I got one license at work, you only needed it to create the vmware image for the first time, no need to have it if you just want to run the virtual machine)
- VMware player (this is free program to run the virtual machine)
Steps:
1. Use ghost to create an image out of your physical hard drive partition. Use option “Partition”-> “To Image” to create an image, this is usually a very large file (~2GB) You don’t need to clone the entire hard disk, just the partition of the drive where OS was installed. At the end, you will get a big file named *.gho ( call it w2k.gho).
2. Copy the created VM image to the box where you will want to create virtual machine.
3. Use VMware workstation to create a new virtual machine, (select MS-DOS as custom-OS type), set reasonable memory size (512MB is a good start).
4. Add virtual disks: you need to add two disks
(1) the virtual disk where your virtual machine will run under, set the initial virtual disk drive IDE drive and a size at least the size of your VM image file size, I choose 6GB just in case I need more disk space.
(2) the physical disk where VMware to access the VM image. (I choose to add my partition 2 (d: drive) where my vmware ghost image was copied
5. Boot your virtual machine with a bootable disk that has ghost.exe, run ghost to restore w2k.gho (located on physical drive) to the virtual drive (use option Image -> Disk)
6. After ghost is done, edit VM setting in VMware workstation to remove the physical drive because you don’t need it any more. and change the OS type to windows 2000 professional.
7. Remove the bootable disk, now boot your virtual machine, if works fine, you should see your windows 200o login screen.
8. Install the vmware tools to get the displayer driver/network driver setup.
9. Once you created the vmware image on VMware workstation, you can run it anywhere where VMware player is installed.
That’s it. pretty simple stuff 
May 15th, 2006
“Match Point” is a smart movie, I especially enjoyed the movie opening, a tennis ball bounced back and force, it finally touched the net and then everything stopped, then you heard the monotone voice of Chris (the bad guy) - “there are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back, with a little luck, it goes forward and you win, or maybe it doesn’t and you lose.”
The start of the movie scared me a bit - I almost suspected that I rented the wrong DVD - the prelude music was like 40’s or 50’s, and as soon as I saw Woody Allen’s name as the writer and director in the openning credit, I was almost determined to let Jane finish the movie alone, but I just couldn’t move my a$$ from the sofa once I started. I was hooked to development of the story, and the end of the story is a total surprise - the bad guy wins.
May 5th, 2006